Starbreak (11 page)

“Xadse zhosoui, xadse zalum zhieselekh,”
their leader said, and gave
Aleksandra Wolff’s binding ties a fervent shake. Her eyes were wide, inflamed at the violence of his touch. But the guard only appraised us carefully.

“Ezli aum aze zasum,”
he replied. Then he entered something into a keypad at the door and stepped aside to let us pass.

They didn’t come with us. They just pushed us inside and left. Metal against metal rang out like a bell.

We struggled to right ourselves. Lifting myself from the dusty ground, I appraised the situation. Under a white canopy yellow light danced and flickered. Meager lean-tos had been constructed, all around the same central point—a fire circle, not unlike the one we’d built at our own camp only days before. But this one had weeks’ worth of ash ringing the stones.

It smelled different here from how it did out in the city. There the atmosphere smelled saccharine-sweet, filled with pollen and the promise of summer to come. Here the air was as pungent as vinegar, as feral as animal musk. This smell wasn’t alien, not at all. It was the unmistakable smell of human body odor. I held my arm up to my mouth, hoping to block the scent.

The old shuttle crew crawled out of their tents on their hands and knees, scrambling to their feet to greet us. They seemed perplexed—as if they’d thought they might live and die in this city without ever seeing another human face. They were haggard, their faces gaunt,
their hair frizzed back in thick ponytails that had begun to turn to dreadlocks. Some of them still wore flight suits, stained beneath the armpits, the once-white fabric gone murky and brown. The others were dressed in the worn, holey cotton they’d donned the day they’d left the ship. They drew close, removing the bindings from our hands.

I took in the gathered travelers. They were all there, all nine of them. And though I almost didn’t recognize her at first, soon my gaze caught sight of a familiar face. Dirty, her black curls lank and dust-grayed against her shoulders. But unmistakable. Hannah. My sister-in-law.

“Terra?” she shouted, laughing. She pushed past the others to reach me, then buried me within a bear hug. I staggered back, but soon was lost within her arms. It didn’t matter to me how bad she smelled, or how dirty her clothes were, or, how much she’d missed of what had transpired on the ship—the dingy council rank cord was still sewn to the shoulder of her uniform. It mattered that she was familiar, that she was safe. Living and breathing right next to me, her heart beating beside mine.

I heard Aleksandra let out a snort, as though the sight of our embrace disgusted her, or worse. But by then the others had drifted away—gone to embrace the shuttle crew, the fellows who we’d thought we’d lost. This time Aleksandra was left standing alone, her curled lip her only companion.

H
annah held me at arm’s length, appraising my condition. I examined her as well. There was a scar on her forehead, where blood, caked with hair, had been allowed to congeal. But she was alive and otherwise whole—in better condition than the other flight crew members. One had an arm in a cast, the skin all swollen and yellow beneath the bandages, the fingers uselessly limp. Another was missing the entire front row of his teeth. But that was old news to her; Hannah was used to their injuries.
She brushed
my
hair aside, gave a sniffling smile, and said, “Terra, what happened to you?”

I grinned through my shock and exhaustion. “We crashed in the wilderness. Out in the mountains up north.”

She glanced back over her shoulder to Aleksandra. “The Council let you go? Didn’t they get our message? We can’t settle here.”

I gazed back too. Aleksandra shifted, smirking.

“The Council doesn’t rule us anymore,” she declared proudly. At her word, the rest of the flight crew turned to stare. She touched two fingers to her heart. “My mother, may her spirit rest, was murdered. I rule the ship now, with the Children of Abel at my side.”

Murmurs of dismay and confusion rose up from the crew. Hannah took me by either shoulder, her expression frantic. I’d forgotten, in my relief at seeing her, who she really was. Daughter of two Council members. Gold thread was knotted through that rank cord.

“My parents,” Hannah said, her words coming out in a rush, “are they okay? And Ronen? Alyana?” Her voice choked on the name of her daughter, the peanut of a baby girl she’d left behind.

“I—” I said, then hesitated. I’d left Ronen in the ship’s bow with the other Council members. I’d run away from them, fleeing toward the dome. At the time I’d thought I could help. Save Captain Wolff, maybe, from her daughter’s hands. But what had I forgotten in my hurry? People—people I loved—that I’d left behind. I hung my head.
But not Aleksandra. She simply gripped the radio in hand and spoke right over the others.

“My men and women report that the Council-loyal have holed themselves up in the ship’s bow where the life support systems are housed,” she said. “They’re following that brat Silvan Rafferty. He’s yet to make his move, but we have reason to believe that he’s planning retaliatory attacks against those who have refused to join him.”

She paused. Her tone went icy. “Of course, if that happens, my men will have no choice but to neutralize any threats. Still eager to join your parents, Hannah? Be a good Council girl?”

Hannah’s hands dropped down.

“No,” she said quickly. “Of—of course not.”

Aleksandra turned to the closest shuttle crew member, the man whose arm was all swollen and green.

“Show me the perimeter,” she demanded. “We need to start planning our escape.”

With his good hand he rubbed his ratty beard. “Yes, ma’am,” he said at last, and led Aleksandra toward the back of the camp. Hannah turned to me. She tucked her hand under my elbow, pulling me to the circle of charred logs and spent ash.

“What’s happened up there?” she asked as she pulled me down to the hard ground beside her. I didn’t know what to say at first as the
others began to gather around us. I turned pleading eyes to Rebbe Davison, but he only bowed his head.

“Tell her,” he said.

So I did. Not everything, of course. I didn’t tell her about the poison—didn’t mention that night in the Raffertys’ quarters, clouding that bottle with powdered foxglove. I didn’t yet tell her about the blood on my hands.

But it was easy—surprisingly easy—to talk about the Children of Abel. I told Hannah about the meetings in that musty library, about the librarian and how he’d once passed messages among us all. I told her about the journal that had been shared between the women of my family, all those hand-marked pages about the first rebels and how they’d resisted the Council every chance they could. And I told her about the riots. The people had flooded the dome, jubilant, drunk, their chants and shouts echoing under the ceiling of glass. They took the granaries. The fields. The shuttle bays. As I spoke, Hannah held her hands between her knees, giving her head a few forceful shakes.

“No, no,” she said softly. “They couldn’t. They couldn’t. Didn’t you get our message?”

I remembered the grainy video I’d watched with Silvan in the command center. The air around us had seemed alive, electric as I’d listened to Hannah’s words. But mostly my attention had been on the men in
the background, with their translucent skin and endless black eyes.

“We did, but it was too late. The riots had already started.”

Silence stretched out, the only sound the wind stirring the camp’s white walls. I leaned forward, watching Hannah intently. “What happened down here? What happened to you?”

I touched my hand to her hairline, to the brown scab that split her forehead.

“It was awful,” Hannah said at last. She nudged at the hard earth with the toe of her boot. “Do you know what the locals call their world? Aur Evez. ‘The crowded land.’ The cities are packed, and the wilderness is filled with
monsters
, Terra. There’s no room for us here, and even if there were, the Ahadizhi—”

“Who?” asked Jachin, sitting forward on his log. Hannah pressed her lips into a wistful smile.

“The furry ones, with all the teeth. They’re carnivores. Hunters. They see us as no different from the animals outside. When we first reached the city after landing, we were hopeful. They ignored us initially. But then something changed. They attacked us. I thought we would be torn apart.”

“If it weren’t for the Xollu, we’d be dead. The tall ones? Travel in pairs? They’re scientists. Scholars. They saved us so that they could study us. But they still don’t understand.”

“Understand what?” Rebbe Davison prodded. Hannah only
stared at him. Finally one of the crew members, a young man with dirt-darkened curls, answered for her.

“Animals,” he said. “They don’t understand animals. They’re not like us. It took us days to figure it out. The tall ones, the Xollu, they don’t eat at all. They seem to survive off water and sunbeams. They don’t even need to breathe. Even the Ahadizhi move like branches in the wind. They’re plants. That’s our theory, at least. The only thing that would explain it.”

We all went silent, staring into the fire. It fit with everything I’d noticed about the planet, the way that the vines tripped through the forests, the way that the hunters had moved, lithe and flexible but not breathing a single breath. And yet it was ridiculous. Completely ridiculous.

“Plants?” said Rebbe Davison. “It can’t be. It just can’t.”

I thought of the boy, of his smooth, tender hands. Of his body, pressed beside mine, cool and fragrant. It seemed right. But it also sounded absurd. What would Mara Stone have to say about this?

“Good thing we brought a botanist,” Jachin said. His lips lifted wryly. It was
supposed
to be a joke.

But nobody laughed. Not even me.

•  •  •

When the sun began to fade through the tent’s walls, Hannah rose from the ground and took my hand in hers.

“Come with me!” she said. “All of you.”

The others scrambled to their feet, dusting off their dingy clothes. But Aleksandra didn’t like to be told what to do. She stayed where she was at the edge of the fire, scowling into it.

“Why?” she asked.

Hannah led us across the compound to where the tents shivered in the warm wind. Her smile was thin, a little ruthless. She wasn’t like the rebels, who fell into line so easily at the sight of their fearless leader. In fact she hardly seemed to have any tolerance for Aleksandra at all.

“Dinnertime,” was all she said.

With that, the gate clanged open. A gang of Ahadizhi came in, hefting a garishly painted cart behind them. They hummed as they worked, throwing down slabs of green, fatty meat. Though the sound was tuneless, meandering, I still had to fight the urge to drift close again. Even Aleksandra stood, watching them, a hungry intensity in her eyes.

But they ignored her, pushed the cart away, and left without so much as a growl.

The crew set upon the food like a pack of wild animals. Dipping their arms into the green puddles of blood, they sorted out the meat that was too slimy, too fetid, too old. Then they began to build a fire to cook it all down.

“When we first got here,” Hannah said, spearing a chunk of meat on a spit, “they didn’t seem to understand that we needed to eat at all. Then they started giving us food, but we had no way to cook it. We were sick, all of us, for days. I thought we’d die. Until their translator came in and suggested fire.”

“Translator?” I asked. Hannah didn’t seem to hear the eagerness in my voice. She only gave a small nod, hefting the meat over the smoking coals.

“He’s a Xollu, but he’s not like the rest of them. Honestly, we thought they all were nothing more than savages at first. Shouting at us and shoving us around. But then one afternoon he walked in. He held his hands up high, like this”—she lifted up her free palm to show me what she meant—“and he said, as clear as day, ‘Hel-lo.’ I think he’d been listening to us for ages.”

“He’s the one who told you,” I said, watching the flame char our dinner, wrapping it up in blue and orange and black, “all about the Ahadizhi and all of that? And the name of the planet? Aur Evez?”

“Yeah,” she said. She drew the spit out of the fire, tearing at the burning meat. Once I’d admired Hannah for her poise; she’d been the mannered daughter of two Council members, after all. Now so much of that had fallen way. She was only a person now, dirty, half-starved. She offered me a sliver of meat. I took it, chewed. “He’s almost nice to talk to. All of the Xollu seem curious—you’ll see, later. But he’s
the only one who has a handle on Asheran. He’s friendly. Even if he’s, you know, different.”

I
didn’t
know. Still chewing, I shook my head. Hannah watched me, considering.

“They call him a
lousk
. The others, I mean. At first we thought it was his name.”

“But it’s not?”

“No.” Her lips pursed. “I’m not sure what it means. ‘Outcast,’ maybe. There’s something sad about him. Don’t take this the wrong way, but he almost reminds me of you. He seems to carry his sadness with him, like his heart has been shattered to bits.”

My
heart was in my throat, pounding out a panicked beat. I thought of the boy, and his arms around me, and his fingers cold against my burning skin. I thought of the way I felt when I was dreaming, so happy that I was afraid the forests around me would be burned away by the force of my joy.

“What do you mean, ‘you’ll see, later’?” I asked, eager to change the subject before she heard the labored, frantic movements of my heart. Hannah shrugged her thin shoulders and tore off another strip of meat.

“They come every morning,” she said, “drag us away in groups to study us. I hate it. It makes me feel like an animal in a cage. We need to get out of here, Terra. They’ll never see us as
people
, only as
lab specimens.” She wiped her mouth on the back of her sleeve and looked toward Aleksandra, who still stood over the fire, staring down into it as it burned.

“You know, I never liked her,” she said, cocking her thumb back, “but I’m glad she’s going to get us out of here.”